NEW DELHI: Taking a swipe at Prime Minister Modi’s address to the nation on GST reforms, the Opposition parties said that the new rates are a ‘mere band-aid after inflicting deep wounds’ and that the reforms are inadequate.
Reacting sharply to PM’s claims that GST reforms will accelerate India’s growth story, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge demanded that the government must apologise to the public for levying GST on essential items.
“Narendra Modi ji, instead of the simple and efficient GST proposed by the Congress party, your government imposed the ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’ with nine different slabs, collecting over Rs 55 lakh crore in eight years. Now you are talking about a Rs 2.5 lakh crore savings festival and applying a band-aid after inflicting deep wounds on the public”, he wrote on X.
Echoing the view, Congress general secretary (communications) Jairam Ramesh said that Modi’s address sought to claim sole ownership of the amendments made to the GST regime by the GST Council, a constitutional body.
The current GST reforms are inadequate, he stressed.The Congress has long described GST as a ‘growth suppressing tax,” said Ramesh, adding that it is plagued by multiple tax brackets, punitive rates on mass-consumption items, large-scale evasion and misclassification, high compliance costs, and an inverted duty structure (where input taxes are higher than output taxes). He said the party has been demanding “GST 2.0” since July 2017.
The Congress leader further pointed out that the key demand of the states, the extension of compensation for another five years remains unaddressed.
The widespread concerns of MSMEs must be addressed meaningfully. Apart from major procedural changes, this involves further increasing the thresholds that apply to interstate supplies,” he pointed out.